Controlling Serailzation of Arrays

Just a quick note on controlling serialization of Arrays... Arrays' serialization is done in a little different way than any other standard datatypes.. There are special attributes available in System.Xml.Serialization which can be used for Arrays.

Generally we are used to using <XmlElement("tagName")> {VB} or [XmlElement("tagName")]{C#} on properties/members of our class... If these properties/members are arrays then the XmlElement attribute will remove the tree structure and convert it into a flat list...

eg.
<tagName>Value1</tagName>
<tagName>Value2</tagName>

instead of
<tagName>
<itemTag>Value1</itemTag>
<itemTag>Value2</itemTag>
</tagName>

If you would want to get the above structure for your Xml serialization, you would have to use following Attributes

<XmlArray("tagName"), XmlArrayItem("itemTag")> {VB} or [XmlArray("tagName"), XmlArrayItem("itemTag")] {C#}

There are many other small details related to attributes etc which you can find at MSDN... Click Here